Stepping out of the shadow of Barack Obama’s unpopular foreign policy may be tough for Hillary Clinton once she formally announces her presidential campaign.
Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

The final days before Hillary Clinton’s expected campaign for president have been marked by a bright yellow warning sign. The controversy over her use of private email to conduct State Department business has shown how perhaps her greatest strength as a candidate – her proven foreign-policy track record – can become a focus for conservative opposition and progressive anxiety about the Clinton way of doing business.

After four years as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton has plenty of diplomatic experience to run on, but scholars, historians and campaign advisers in the days before an expected formal campaign launch are wondering whether she will run away from Obama’s view of the world – and the shadow of its unpopularity.

With polls suggesting that a guiding premise of Obama’s foreign policy – “Don’t do stupid shit” – fell out of favour with the American public almost two years ago, the questions 19 months from Election Day start at Foggy Bottom and spread across the globe: how far might candidate Clinton go to distance herself from secretary Clinton? Would she support boots on the ground in Syria? Additional troops in Iraq? Shipping arms to Ukraine? A more assertive presence in the East China Sea?

Previews of the answers Clinton might give on the campaign trail suggest a leader who is more hawkish than Obama – possibly much more hawkish, foreign-policy watchers say – but who may be guided by a preference for alliance-based negotiations of the kind that informed her husband’s presidency.

Before laying out her policy, Clinton would first have to survive – and respond to – what promises to be excited attacks from less experienced Republicans, with what they will argue is proof that the foreign policy she executed has been a disaster for the United States. Likely proffered as evidence will be 200,000 deaths in Syria, a battered friendship with Israel, Isis beheading videos, maps of chaos in Yemen or Libya, activists cut adrift in Venezuela and Hong Kong, and the Russian incursion in Ukraine.

Richard Grenell, a longtime US spokesman at the United Nations who was briefly a national security spokesman for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, said Clinton was, ironically, in a singularly vulnerable spot on foreign policy among the potential candidates.

“I think Republicans and Democrats both get to say: ‘Don’t saddle me with the failures of my party in the past,’” Grenell said. “However, Hillary Clinton is unique. She was actually the implementer of the foreign policy. So there’s a difference, because with Hillary, all you’re trying to do is hold her accountable for the actual job that she just had.”

We don’t know what the future will throw up for Clinton. What one can say is her instincts will be aggressive ones

Public opinion did not turn against the Obama administration’s foreign policy, according to pollingaverages, until the summer of 2013 – months after Clinton had left the administration. That summer saw the violation by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad of Obama’s self-dubbed (or flubbed) “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, a coup in Egypt, the Edward Snowden revelations and an explosion of congressionalinterest in the September 2012 attacks on US outposts in Benghazi, Libya.

Defenders of the president’s foreign policy note that the past six years have seen a steep drop-off in losses of American lives and treasure in conflicts overseas.

“The problem is, nobody ever remembers a negative, unfortunately,” said Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. “They should.”

Clinton, meanwhile, may continue to look for ways to back away from the foreign policy of the Obama administration, as delicate a procedure as that may be. The process began last summer, with the publication of Hard Choices, Clinton’s memoir of her State Department years, in which she describes the “difficult position” of having advocated for doing more to help the Syrian rebellion – only to be overruled.

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In an August 2014 interview, Clinton went so far as to use the word “failure” in describing the Obama policy in Syria, saying: “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad ... left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said “some modest, limited criticisms of the president” might be expected from a candidate Clinton.

“She can’t totally separate herself on this,” Zelizer said. “In the end, her record will be judged in part on President Obama’s record, and I don’t think voters would love a former secretary of state who says ‘I disagreed with everything I did.’ And so in some ways I think she has to live with the record she inherits from her time in office.”

‘In the end, her record will be judged in part on President Obama’s record.’ Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters

The vagaries of a presidential campaign could pressure Clinton to shift on foreign policy, depending on whom she might end up facing on the Republican side, and the level of her need to distinguish herself from the opposition, analysts said.

Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who is expected to announce his presidential bid on Tuesday, has expressed deep reluctance to intervene with military force abroad, while a candidate such as Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and brother of George W Bush, may be more ready to support a new military deployment in the Middle East.

“I think they’ve got a huge challenge, too,” said Grenell of the Republican presidential field. “Because they’ve got to show that they are sufficiently going to lead the world, and they are going to absolutely be different from Barack Obama, without looking like they want to just police the world.”

Pressure from the Republican side may not be necessary for Clinton to emerge as a newly fledged foreign-policy hawk, multiple analysts said, because she already is one. They pointed to her record as a senator from New York, when she voted for the use of force resolution on Iraq, and as secretary of state, when she supported the addition in 2009 of 30,000 troops to the Afghanistan war and was in favor of a muscular intervention in Libya.

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Lieven, who has written about Clinton’s hawkishness on foreign policy, said it was unlikely that Clinton, whose grassroots staff is already joining an invisible campaign that could signal an April kickoff, would emerge as more strongly interventionist than she had otherwise presented herself to be.

“Given how hawkish she has been, that would be very hawkish indeed,” said Lieven.

“We don’t know what the future will throw up for Hillary Clinton,” he said. “What one can say is that her own instincts in response to anything that happens will be aggressive ones.”

Speculation about how the 2016 campaign could play out is quickly giving way to the campaign itself. Florida senator Marco Rubio, the 43-year-old Republican who has been in Congress for less than one term but sits on the foreign relations committee, used an appearance on Fox News this week to accuse Clinton of compromising the security of the United States with her emails.

“I’m not involved in, in you know, communicating with my staff about things that put the diplomacy of the United States at risk,” Rubio said.

He has said he will make a major announcement – expected to mark the start of his presidential campaign – on 13 April.